Using multiple UX research sources to incrementally improve a product • 5 min read
How can we collect and collate our research and present it to the team in a way to foster creativity?
My Role
​
UX Research coordination, conducting usability tests, interviews and running affinity mapping exercise
3 weeks
Project Time
​
The challenge
After months of product development and incremental upgrades, as well as overhauls of various parts of our user experience and interfaces, the challenge was that we needed to “tighten” the product, and find out where problems had potentially existed for months but remained undiscovered. There were a handful of exercises we could conduct internally, as well as a few enthusiasts that we could conduct more detailed activities with.
​
These would target the "project browsing" section of the app, as well as the "3D interior design" section, referred to from here on as "3D design".
​
Background
We were finding that users were not progressing through the application in a fast enough manner, and were being bogged down in menus. This would cause them to abandon vital flows before hitting the primary 3D design part of the application. There were also issues within the 3D design section, specifically that designing from minute to minute was a slower experience than we’d anticipated.
The approach
To collect some data beyond anything we had internally, we first conducted Usability Tests. The first half of the usability test was focusing on project exploration and creation, testing in a quantitative unguided manner how long it took a user to progress to any desired conversion point, followed by a qualitative review of their experience. The same process was then replicated within the 3D design section.
​
Part of the affinity mapping Results
​We acquired a sample of 5 users, identified as part of our core audience for our launch period. It was important to ensure that this was their first exposure to the application.
Additionally, we began conducting interviews, trying to target the specific desires of our target audience when using products like ours, and attempt to find out whether or not the original flows designed were providing useful information, or simply taking up too much time
Finally we conducted an Affinity Mapping exercise, by collating all research we had gathered so far, combining it with some basic Analytics that we’d gathered. The aim here was to try and highlight problem areas in the app that were appearing across all research that we were conducting. We would then attempt to prioritise using the results from the affinity mapping exercise
​
Our findings
Something that became evident whilst conducting the interviews was that users desired to be doing interior design in 3D much quicker than we had anticipated. This was then reconfirmed by data from the usability tests, where users would struggle without being given external direction.
Although a good user experience was important to guide them into their designs, users were spending too much time in configuration steps and were more interested in the app proving itself in light of the marketing materials presented to the user. Our solution here was to create interactive empty states to push users towards the creation flow sooner, which can be read about here.
Another finding was that although our technology seemed to be stable, users spent a lot of time in loading states. We were unable to reduce the loading time, but it did present us with an opportunity to educate the user about the application, and specifically the complex 3D interaction system. To combat this, we created loading screen animations, that included helpful tips and tricks for users.
​
Simple loading screen with user hints to help with educating users on more complex functionality
A combination of the usability testing and analytics, pointed out how when in the 3D design, many users were intimidated by the intense amount of new interactions that were available to them. Additionally, many users were confused by the sheer number of icons within menus with little guidance as to what they did. There were multiple solutions designed to cover this problem which can be read about here, and these included adding labelling to many buttons, as well as creating a dynamic contextual radial interface.
​
Learnings
Collecting unbiased research, and weighting collected research was perhaps the greatest struggle throughout the research phases of design. Though we had lots of potential sources for sample users, many had been tainted by being too familiar with the product either through earlier rounds of testing, or by being too close to those working on the product.
Additionally, when conducting the affinity mapping exercise, it was clear that some internal participants had stronger opinions about sections of the product that they were more involved in. This meant that once all data was collected, weighting it accordingly was vital, and we could’ve created a better process to do this.